Panthera, 8 West 40th Street, 18th Floor, NY 10018, USA.
Panthera, 8 West 40th Street, 18th Floor, NY 10018, USA.
Sci Total Environ. 2023 Jun 15;877:162916. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162916. Epub 2023 Mar 17.
Monitoring wildlife populations to determine changing abundance is the basis for conservation strategies and interventions. Monitoring, however, is expensive, and we lack baseline data for countless species and landscapes around the globe. One solution is to utilize methods that leverage observations collected by everyday people. Humans are not only excellent sensors for diverse data, but possess a remarkable ability to process data and differentiate patterns with minimal training. Here, we explored the potential for people, including guides who work in tourism in southern Patagonia, to determine whether paired photographs of puma (Puma concolor puma) faces were the same individual, akin to a computer-led Siamese network analysis. Overall, participants performed well (average score of 92.2 %) and we detected no differences in local people versus those from the USA, or differences due to differential experience working with pumas. Based on these results, we built a historic capture-recapture dataset of individual pumas collected by local guides and report annual abundance for a portion of the Torres del Paine UNESCO Biosphere in southern Chile, an area lacking such data and of critical conservation for the species. Our results highlight the innate capabilities of human computers and their potential for contributing to wildlife surveys in novel ways to increase science capacity.
监测野生动物种群的数量变化是制定保护策略和干预措施的基础。然而，监测是昂贵的，我们缺乏全球无数物种和景观的基线数据。一种解决方案是利用由普通人收集的观察数据。人类不仅是多样化数据的优秀传感器，而且具有极小化训练就能处理数据和区分模式的非凡能力。在这里，我们探索了包括在巴塔哥尼亚南部从事旅游业的导游在内的人们，通过对比美洲狮（Puma concolor puma）面部的成对照片，来确定它们是否为同一只个体的潜力，这类似于计算机引导的暹罗网络分析。总的来说，参与者表现出色（平均得分为 92.2%），我们没有发现当地人、来自美国的人与美洲狮接触经验差异，也没有发现任何差异。基于这些结果，我们构建了一个由当地导游收集的个体美洲狮的历史捕捉-再捕获数据集，并报告了智利南部一部分托雷斯德尔潘恩教科文组织生物圈的年度丰度，该地区缺乏此类数据，对该物种的保护至关重要。我们的研究结果突出了人类计算机的内在能力及其以新颖的方式为野生动物调查做出贡献、提高科学能力的潜力。
